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Why Wikipedia’s Millionth Russian Page Is Worth Celebrating

In the early hours of 11 May, a volunteer somewhere wrote the millionth substantive page on the Russian-language edition of Wikipedia. Crossing the 1,000,000-page mark is mainly a symbolic one, an aesthetically and cognitively pleasing number for us ten-fingered mammals, but it seems as good a time as any to take stock of the importance of Russian Wikipedia, the only major version of the encyclopedia serving a readership that does not live in a liberal democracy.

Russian Wikipedia crossed the million-article mark at some point around 0300 UTC on 11 May.

Firstly, we need to acknowledge that the Russian-language section of Wikipedia is a roaring success. In terms of size, Russian is the sixth largest edition of the online encyclopedia (measured by number of content pages, excluding redirects etc), outdone only by Western European languages. In terms of traffic, Russian is now the third most accessed (measured in views per hour), only the English and Spanish sites are busier. In both cases, Russian has outpaced world languages like Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, and Portuguese. In Russia, wikipedia.org is the 9th most visited domain, and the site gets similar traffic levels from former Soviet states where Russian remains a lingua franca.

Secondly, we need to acknowledge that Wikipedia is a thoroughly political animal, as is the entire Wikimedia/Creative Commons ecosystem in which it operates. The encyclopedia takes the anarchic ideals of the free software movement, and ports them to the wider cultural sphere (something I have argued in detail before). The subversive nature of Wikipedia does not lie in its language, political vision, or rejection of institutional norms, but in its status as a flourishing cultural counterexample in which ideas cannot be owned, the law can be repurposed and used against institutions, and code and knowledge circulate as free speech.

Political establishments in the developed world have sometimes struggled with this brand of politics, hence the skirmishes with Anonymous, Wikileaks, and Occupy, but the Western political order is flexible enough to welcome Wikipedia as one of the fruits of Internet culture.

Not so in Russia. After a slight political thaw during the Medvedev presidency, the Russian political order is at its most rigid in years. Putin returned to the Kremlin on 7 May 2012, and the year that has passed has not been a good one for political freedoms in Russia. Most telling is the return of the Soviet-style show trial, which was dusted down a few years ago during the political annihilation of oligarch Khodorkovsky, and in the last year has been used with Kafkaesque gusto against blaspheming punks, a dead lawyer, and an anti-corruption blogger. The state has also clamped down hard on NGOs, co-opted the Orthodox Church into an increasingly political role, and steadily chiselled away at Internet freedoms. I say “the state,” but it is anything but monolithic. Putin mediates between an amorphous blob of rival clans, a tangle of overlapping lines of patronage greased by petrodollars and endemic corruption. In one sense, Russia is governed by a hive mind, albeit one directed by a set of signals from the top of the food chain.

Maybe this is why Russians are so good at Wikipedia, the slightly lawless working environment is familiar (Medvedev called it “legal nihilism”, Wikipedians call it the fifth pillar), but unlike in real life, the chaos of Wikipedia is channelled into something quite productive.

Muscovites protest on 6 May, the eve of the one year anniversary of Putin’s return to the presidency. The Kremlin struggles to maintain legitimacy among urban populations plugged into global flows of information (Image: Alexei Navalny)

I don’t want to fall into the trap of psycho-analysing Russia from afar, so let me simply say that the Russian state does not like Wikipedia. Unlike any other mainstream source of information in Russia, Wikipedia does not owe the state anything. The success of such a project was so unfathomable to the authorities, that at one point the planned response was to create a state-sponsored rival to Wikipedia, written entirely by experts. The fact that the agency involved thought that building a state-sponsored Encyclopedia Britannica from scratch would be a winning formula indicates that the Russian state struggles to incorporate web 2.0 (and all that) into its worldview.

Of course web 2.0 (to use a phrase that is now deeply unfashionable) doesn’t really care about the Kremlin worldview, and goes about its business regardless. But collaborative production is not just something that happens, it is a staunchly territorial movement, and that became clear last July when the Russian State Duma was getting ready to vote on legislation that would force ISPs to filter websites with certain types of harmful content (related to drugs, suicide, and child pornography). Russian Wikipedia had a 24-hour blackout in protest against the law, similar to the blackouts held on English-language sites against SOPA six months previously.

Wikimedia is part of a wider community of liberal Russian Internet activists, some which is marked by formal membership of a user movement, some of which is more tacit. In January 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation received a million-dollar donation from Pavel Durov, the head of the Russian social network VK (which is like Facebook but with filesharing capability). Durov is a very interesting character, an impulsive libertarian who once gave his main investor the finger, via a twitpic. A staunch vegetarian with a strong views on alcohol, smoking, education, and governance, he is not the pliant whipping boy the Kremlin wants in charge of the country’s largest social network, so his days in charge there are probably numbered. Under a different set of circumstances Durov might have donated his money to one of the many opposition groups trying to modernise and liberalise Russia offline, but he gave it to Wikimedia, a cause which is political, but not too political.

If Durov does lose control of VK, Russian Wikipedia might well be next in the firing line. The first shots have probably already been fired, with a slew of drug and suicide related pages added to a blacklist of banned websites. The takedown notices bore all the bureaucratic hallmarks of the censorship process: incoherent, contradictory, and of unclear origin. The response from Wikipedia’s Russia volunteers was defiant, pages would be reworded more delicately but not blocked, what Kevin Rothrock has described as a “suicide mission” against the censors. The most militant response may have been from Jimmy Wales himself, who wrote that “being blocked is always preferable to collaborating with censors […] We are not weak, we are very powerful. Catering to the demands of weak and cowardly politicians – the kind who fear the spread of knowledge – is not the Wikipedia way.”

Whatever the outcome of a Kremlin-Wikimedia showdown, the world’s largest Russian encyclopedia will continue to pursue its thinly veiled political mission, which extends far beyond the borders of Russia. Across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, millions use Russian as a second language ahead of English, and in many of these places the local language Wikipedia is underdeveloped or flawed. Aside from that, many readers and editors are Russian speakers who have emigrated elsewhere. As hinted at by the work of Mark Graham, diasporas play a major role in the writing of Wikipedia articles. While the Kremlin might not like anything too grassroots, it has an acute appreciation of soft power, and is unlikely to do anything that would leave the Russian-language narrative in the hands of Russians living in Britain, Israel, and the States. The Kremlin would be more likely to try and co-opt that narrative, with paid editors toning down sensitive content. But regardless of how they might mangle articles and troll the talk pages in the future, they will never be able to escape the fact that Wikipedia offers a counterexample of what Russian society might one day look like, evidence that there is nothing in the Russian soul that precludes it from democracy, civility, and success.

TL;DR…

The Russian edition of Wikipedia is one of the most successful. Of the major Wikipedia language communities, Russian-speaking users arguably enjoy the least political freedom.

The Russian government is apprehensive of Wikipedia’s independence, but editors have repeatedly shown political backbone in the face of the confrontation, including a blackout in protest against Internet censorship and the refusal of takedown requests.

Wikimedia’s allies in Russia include the open source software community and the Russian Pirate Party. The most influential individual supporter is probably Pavel Durov, the head of Russia’s largest social network VK, but he appears to now be the target of a Kremlin campaign.

Russian Wikipedia provides an important service to countries in the former Soviet space where Russian remains a lingua franca over English.

Updates:

In an apparent act of deja vu, the Russian Wikipedia page for cannabis has once again been placed on the list of banned websites.

This article was originally posted on 7 May in anticipation of the million-page mark, and updated on 11 May once that threshold had been passed. — Lui (@yablochko)

Thanks. The .cc domain comes from the Cocos Islands, a set of tropical atolls and coral reefs in the Indian Ocean. Alas, I do not live there. I just use it as a reference to Creative Commons, and because I like the reference to a “carbon copy” (as in email cc) which plays on the meaning of simulacrum (the loss of the original in simulation and imitation).

This article is a collection of stereotypes and an example of the author’s wishful thinking in his simplified world. This black-and-white simplification is wrong in politics as well as in the analysis of Wikipedia. The Russian Wikipedia is neither a mouthpiece of the opposition nor is it dominated of liberal activists.

I’m sorry it appeared that way. I realise that highlighting isolated political cases overstates the level of lawlessness in Russia, just as Bradley Manning & Guantanamo overstate the level of injustice in the United States. But in both cases it should be possible to criticise those responsible without having to acknowledge that the mainstream experience is quite different.

As for your last point, I agree entirely. The Russian Wikipedia is neither a mouthpiece of the opposition nor is it dominated of liberal activists. I think it’s provocative nature is in its structure, as a successful grassroots organisation. This structure challenges institutions in Western Europe as well, it is a near-anarchic community that has done something no university could do! The reason I wrote specifically about the Russian Wikipedia is because out of the major languages it is the one which has had most conflict with a government (the French Wikipedia is a close second).

I’ve been writing in Russian Wikipedia for eight years and out of those 1,000,000 articles there are approx. 3,000 that were created by me. I think it’s a shame that some vain admins want to challenge the Russian state and to publicly show disrespect for the laws of the state most of the readers come from. It’s legitimate for a state to protects its citizens from destructive information such as suicide or drugs. As long as the interference doesn’t go further, there’s no big deal in it and no need to declare a Holy War.

Hopefully a solution can be found that lets encyclopedic information remain without the need for a confrontation with the state. Have you found this to be divisive in the editor community? Or have people avoided getting involved? I haven’t read the discussion pages on it.

Lovely. So instead of accepting a right of the Russians for self-identification, own view of our history, our own view of politics and, of course, our view of laws and sorting out information allowed and safe for public use *caught*Assange and Manning*caught* our “friends” are going to decide it for us, huh? C’mon, westerners, no need to be Einstein to understand that how-to-use-drugs and child porn have nothing to do with evil Putin opressing fredom of speech or whatever BS they put into your tiny heads. If Wikipedia is going to influence politics the way somebody desires, then shutting it down is the only option to avoid falling into someone greedy hands.

Wikipedia is a platform for self-identification, it allows Russian speakers to write history/politics/everything in their own terms. Most edits are from Russia: http://rcmap.hatnote.com/#ru As for the banned material, yes there are certainly some officials who want to ban the cannabis article because of public health concerns, those are very legitimate concerns. The tension between the state and Wikipedia is a culture clash (a culture clash that exists between many EU/US institutions and Wikipedia).

Yes it is, doesn’t mean it is dominated or should be dominated or controlled by a certain group of people, no matter if they support the government or not.
I respect Wikipedia administration view of an all-free information, but it is a bit hypocritical for you to support the rule of law and order in Russia and everywhere else and support wikipedia administration unwilling to obey the law. It is simple: if they want to work in a country they obey the law of this country.

Don’t you really think Kremlin cares that much about Wikipedia and a small army check it all day every day for political correctness, do you?

I like the other articles on your site, but this one is in my opinion misleading. I do not understand such amount of rusophobia abroad and I am sad when I see it is done by Russians.

If I understood correctly, you are a Russian working in UK. I am a Serbian working in AT. So, pretty similarly, there are some parallels in historical relations of our countries (I mean RU-UK, RS-AT). Both of us are working at academia too :)

In contrast to Russians, Serbs have already felt on their skin these things like liberal democracy, or democracy as general etc. In the last century for three times we have been victims of this generous and brave western world. I am not willing here to portray things black-white, but from this distance, my personal experience, and the fact that I am living in this EU context, I possess a more direct understanding of relations between countries and cultures and what is beeing hidden under these mellifluous layers.

I think it is completely ok what you write here, and what you are striving to. Freedom and justice. Just please be careful that your writing and ideals are not misused by entities which do want to harm Russia.

I’m really enjoying the design and layout of your blog.
It’s a very easy on the eyes which makes it
much more pleasant for me to come here and visit more often. Did you hire out a designer to create your theme?
Superb work!